(no subject)
Today, among other things, I read three boring but necessary articles about diplomatics and archive construction that made me want to claw my eyes out of my head, and wrote up summaries of two of them plus another one I read yesterday. Things were looking grim at 4:00 when I finished. Then I opened up Patrick Geary's Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium, just to see what it was about and how it was structured (Geary's chapters tend toward standalone type deals) and started reading it. By four pages in, it had totally rocked my world (or blown my mind - feel free to choose your own innuendo-tinged phrase).
First, there was this explanation of some aspects of the Tea Party and current American politics more generally:
"John Pocock has observed that when traditional relationships between present and past break down, those most affected by the rupture respond by reshaping an understanding of that which unites past and present in terms of some new continuity in order to defend themselves from the effects of this rupture." (p. 8)
Then it went on to talk about the eleventh century, and it wasn't actually talking about the American political climate to begin with, but still. More mindblowing for me, however, was this:
"This model [of the early medieval past from the perspective of the eleventh century] emphasized creativity and freedom from the past represnted by the "golden age" of the Carolingian world and the "dark age" of the tenth century, the latter characterized by radical discontinuity largely blamed on external forces such as Saracen, Magyar, and Norse raids and invasions. Those living on the other side of this caesura felt themselves separated by a great gulf from this earlier age." (p. 9)
This absolutely blew my mind for several reasons. First of all, it was one of those moments when something I'd noticed, but never thought about in a focused way, clicked, and I was like "that completely articulates what I see going on in my eleventh-century sources." Then, I thought about how eerily that idea parallels the temporal distribution of say, Breton monastic charters. And just now, I realized how even more eerily that parallels the modern historiography of the tenth century, at least in France. Lots of historians of the central middle ages in France have actually tried to bridge the tenth-century "dark age" by (sometimes quite imaginatively) stretching out the Carolingian order and making it endure until the early-eleventh century, often on the grounds that there are few surviving tenth-century charters for many areas. There does seem to be a discontinuity in charter survival between the tenth and eleventh centuries, but now I'm wondering how much of that was a result of new ways of thinking about the past in the eleventh century. Did eleventh-century monks destroy the records of the tenth century? Or did the tenth century have different preoccupations that weren't relevant in the eleventh? All those scattered mentions of communities of reformed Benedictine monks replacing communities of corrupt and unholy canons suggests that just maybe there might have been some of both. And once again, it all comes down on the eleventh century.
Oh, eleventh century. You are endlessly fascinating and you have the best charters and you haven't quite tipped over into the brave twelfth-century world of cistercians and papal monarchy and the revival of canon law and well-defined property rights and you beat up your peasants and your enemies and sometimes the monks next door and all your best anglophone historians run with the early medievalists and the anthropologists and the archaeologists even if they over-quote Rodolfus Glaber and put the Bayeux tapestry on the covers of too many of their books, but you are also very, very demanding.
It might be possible to blame everything on the reformed monks, or at least, everything until the revival of canon law and emergence of the Cistercians, which, as I think we can all agree, killed fun in Latin Christendom for a good long time.
First, there was this explanation of some aspects of the Tea Party and current American politics more generally:
"John Pocock has observed that when traditional relationships between present and past break down, those most affected by the rupture respond by reshaping an understanding of that which unites past and present in terms of some new continuity in order to defend themselves from the effects of this rupture." (p. 8)
Then it went on to talk about the eleventh century, and it wasn't actually talking about the American political climate to begin with, but still. More mindblowing for me, however, was this:
"This model [of the early medieval past from the perspective of the eleventh century] emphasized creativity and freedom from the past represnted by the "golden age" of the Carolingian world and the "dark age" of the tenth century, the latter characterized by radical discontinuity largely blamed on external forces such as Saracen, Magyar, and Norse raids and invasions. Those living on the other side of this caesura felt themselves separated by a great gulf from this earlier age." (p. 9)
This absolutely blew my mind for several reasons. First of all, it was one of those moments when something I'd noticed, but never thought about in a focused way, clicked, and I was like "that completely articulates what I see going on in my eleventh-century sources." Then, I thought about how eerily that idea parallels the temporal distribution of say, Breton monastic charters. And just now, I realized how even more eerily that parallels the modern historiography of the tenth century, at least in France. Lots of historians of the central middle ages in France have actually tried to bridge the tenth-century "dark age" by (sometimes quite imaginatively) stretching out the Carolingian order and making it endure until the early-eleventh century, often on the grounds that there are few surviving tenth-century charters for many areas. There does seem to be a discontinuity in charter survival between the tenth and eleventh centuries, but now I'm wondering how much of that was a result of new ways of thinking about the past in the eleventh century. Did eleventh-century monks destroy the records of the tenth century? Or did the tenth century have different preoccupations that weren't relevant in the eleventh? All those scattered mentions of communities of reformed Benedictine monks replacing communities of corrupt and unholy canons suggests that just maybe there might have been some of both. And once again, it all comes down on the eleventh century.
Oh, eleventh century. You are endlessly fascinating and you have the best charters and you haven't quite tipped over into the brave twelfth-century world of cistercians and papal monarchy and the revival of canon law and well-defined property rights and you beat up your peasants and your enemies and sometimes the monks next door and all your best anglophone historians run with the early medievalists and the anthropologists and the archaeologists even if they over-quote Rodolfus Glaber and put the Bayeux tapestry on the covers of too many of their books, but you are also very, very demanding.
It might be possible to blame everything on the reformed monks, or at least, everything until the revival of canon law and emergence of the Cistercians, which, as I think we can all agree, killed fun in Latin Christendom for a good long time.